David Perell Clips
@PerellClips • 2,582 subscribers
I interview the world's top writers. New episodes every Wednesday, and this is a feed of the very best clips. My personal account: @david_perell
Videos
David Sedaris thinks that if we just lived for the plot, we'd have material to write anything. He explains: "My friend asked me what I did in the afternoon. I said, 'I went to the post office.' He replied, 'Why would you do that? You don't even need to go to the post office. If you have something you want mailed, you have the hotel called FedEx and they come and pick it up.'" "I don't want to live like you. I want to go to the post office. And I went to the post office and it was remarkable. Or sometimes you go to the post office and the person is just grumpy and you can even get something out of that." "I wanna live. I wanna be out there. I don't wanna sit at home and order everything online, and use all the shortcuts."
David Perell Clips388,113 Aufrufe • vor 7 Tagen
Academics write for each other, not for people. Steven Pinker has spent over four decades doing the opposite, and thinks current academic writing is "enormous wasted effort." "There's an awful lot of brilliant work, really smart people in academia. Why are they doing it? Just to entertain each other? Taxpayers pay for it. It should be accessible. Why should I have to read a paragraph five or six times? It gets under my skin when academics devote so much brainpower into the scholarship and then just blow off the essential task of letting the world know what you've done."
David Perell Clips853,313 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Just write the bad sentence. Pixar's Andrew Stanton on why it's more important to do the work, even if it sucks, than to talk about the great work you'll make (and never do it): "There's a term for it: whistling on the steps of Carnegie Hall. Most people spend more time telling you the symphony they're going to write than the symphony is written. Finish the sentence. I don't care if it doesn't have an ending, or a middle. Just freaking write the sentence. It's gonna be bad. You don't get to the nice sentence until you've written the bad sentence. Writing is rewriting." "It's chipping away at the marble. Every time you decide not to, you're not practicing. So you're just going to be that much less practiced."
David Perell Clips81,468 Aufrufe • vor 4 Tagen
"Most people can't write. I'm not saying that to be an asshole. It's just the reality. I think I'm a good writer. But I read García Márquez and I'm like, holy shit. I couldn't do that if you paid me a billion dollars and gave me 20 years. Most people can get to a certain level. You can push, you can learn. But you have to understand what you're good at, and go for that. When I read writers trying to do creative dramatic leads and it's just not working. It's like, you're clearly good at X. Focus on X." — Nick Bilton
David Perell Clips715,916 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Ezra Klein: "Having AI summarize a book or paper for me is a disaster. It has no idea what I really wanted to know and wouldn't have made the connections I would've made. I'm interested in the thing I will see that other people wouldn't have seen, and I think AI typically sees what everybody else would see. I'm not saying that AI can't be useful, but I'm pretty against shortcuts. And obviously, you have to limit the amount of work you're doing. You can't read literally everything. But in some ways, I think it's more dangerous to think you've read something that you haven't than to not read it at all. I think the time you spend with things is pretty important." Ezra Klein
David Perell Clips2,053,696 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Dave Kitson was an ok football player. Yet, his book outsold David Beckham, Frank Lampard, and Steven Gerrard's combined. Harry Dry on the copywriting principle that explains why: "I think it's a foundational copywriting principle: what can I do that no one else is doing that people care about? Kitson had a bad career. All these guys wrote books about their careers playing for England. Kitson didn't have any of that. He thought: 'I've been in the Premier League. So I'll tell some truths. I'll do an undercover. I'll tell you this player's got a gambling addiction. This is what it's like when England go abroad and everyone's going out.' But no one wants to read a book by Dave Kitson. So instead, he signed it as The Secret Footballer. Kitson's product is objectively so much worse than David Beckham's. But just by positioning it, just by a little bit of storytelling, he could outsell him. That's copywriting."
David Perell Clips151,188 Aufrufe • vor 16 Tagen
"We've been homogenizing writing since long before AI." Ocean Vuong says: "It coincided with the rise of the newspaper. The newspaper needed to be standardized after the Civil War because it was completely reckless. Exclamation marks were everywhere. Sure it was beautiful but for information delivery, it was terrible. So the English started to become tamed. It became efficient. It went for clarity. It had to have enough brevity to keep room for advertising. And this comes from the newspaper model. There are plenty of works that are written beautifully from that but it's done incredible damage to young writers' imaginations because the sentence has now been so timid."
David Perell Clips955,313 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Elon Musk is so famous you'd think you've heard it all. So when Jimmy Soni interviewed him, he opened with the one question that humanizes him. Jimmy asked about Greg Kouri, a close friend and early investor in Elon's first company, Zip2. Greg died at a very young age: "I said, Elon, I want to begin our interview a little bit differently. I had read about this gentleman that had helped you early on in your life. I found his widow, and we talked. Can you talk about him? There's a pause. And he goes, 'Oh my god.' He gave me this minute long meditation on Greg and their friendship and everything that it meant to him. Nobody's talking to him about Greg Kouri. The human beings that I interview, they have lives that exist outside of the very narrow frame of reference that we see them for. What's the thing that they never get talked about that reveals something about their character?"
David Perell Clips157,349 Aufrufe • vor 26 Tagen
Indifference kills humor. Which is funnier: "This coffee is ok" vs. "This coffee is so bad even Dunkin' wouldn't serve it" Tom Segura explained this to me: "Being annoyed is funny. My seven-year-old is annoyed all the time, and he's hilarious. Sometimes I wonder, 'Why are you so annoyed?' Then he'll say something like, 'What's this table doing in the middle of the room? I keep running into it!' It's a funny perspective to be bothered by furniture. Complaining is definitely funny. What's not funny is total indifference. When it comes to being funny, you simply have to have an opinion.
David Perell Clips175,940 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Here's how to tell a better story at your next dinner conversation. Tom Segura calls it the "way in" "One of the big things people always talk about when doing standup is having a story but wondering about the 'way in.' The reason for telling a story is often as important, if not more so, than the story itself. You could just say, 'One time, I was almost the spokesman for Subway. Here's what happened.' But on stage, I started by saying, 'I'm so grateful to be performing here. I thought the highlight of my career was when I booked the campaign to be the spokesman for Subway.' Right there, you give yourself a reason to tell the story. You have a story, but you need to figure out your way in. Figure out a reason for saying it. Don't get lazy about those moments; figure out why." The way into a story is by tying it to stakes; the stakes are what make the person across from you lean in and ask, "What happened?"
David Perell Clips172,246 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
"The greatest piece of American art ever made is Absalom, Absalom." Wright Thompson says: "Faulkner gets something so essentially right about the South. It's a place where the conflict that exists inside the hearts of every human being is played out on the landscape in an external way that almost never happens. The South is one of the few places in the world where the interior becomes manifestly exterior. You know how they have energy vortexes in Sedona? Likewise, the South is one of those places where the thing cracks open and the big subterranean human ideas — the conflict in the heart of every human being burst into physical action on the actual physical land. William Faulkner could see that. He had that Sixth Sense. One of the reasons that book resonates with people across generations is that he's describing something you've instinctually felt but never had the vocabulary to describe."
David Perell Clips277,431 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Nobody likes to be lectured. And yet nearly everything we consume online; politics, self-improvement, finance, is exactly that. Morgan Housel has sold 11 million books doing the opposite. "Nobody likes someone to basically say: 'hey, idiot, you've done it wrong the whole time, and if you had done it my way, you'd be in a better spot.'" He never tells you what to do. He just tells stories about psychology, how people actually behave with money. "Nobody likes to be shamed. If you give them enough stories about psychology, they'll figure it out for themselves."
David Perell Clips63,091 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Walking makes you more creative Daniel Pink says: "The research on walking is unbelievable. There's a famous study where they put people in a chair and they put people on a treadmill, and they do the "alternative uses for an object test." Basically, you give somebody something mundane like a brick and ask: How many different uses can you have for the brick? You can use it as a door stop. You can use it as a step ladder to reach something you can't reach. You can use it as a paper weight. The people who were walking on a treadmill generated like three times as many ideas as the people sitting in a chair. Wow. It's unbelievable. They were just in a treadmill in a laboratory." Daniel Pink
David Perell Clips231,225 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
John F. Kennedy was one of America's best speechwriters, and his secret weapon was a rhetorical trick called Chiasmus. Some examples: 1) "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." 2) "Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind." 3) "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate." All of these follow the same pattern. The lesson is that humans love symmetry. Both in buildings like the Taj Mahal or St. Paul's Cathedral, and with language when we have symmetrical sentences like the ones JFK used to use so often.
David Perell Clips162,295 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
The better AI writing gets, the less we'll want to read it. Life of Pi author Yann Martel explains why: 1) AI Inflation "Once you know it's AI, then suddenly it's like special effects in movies. I find my kids when they watch movies with special effects, they'll just shrug because we know a computer can generate anything. So a sort of inflation sets in where we're less impressed. Then you have a great actor who's just acting with no special effects and it's like, wow, that works. What really has an impact is the actor emoting the authenticity of that." 2) AI Aversion "I think publishers are going to start saying, 'hey, it cannot be beyond spell check and maybe minimal AI, but you cannot use AI.' I think readers will agree with that, and that the ones who cheat on that will be seen as cheaters. They're not going to get published, but even if they do, they won't be read. They're not going to win prizes, they're not going to win good reviews. It'll be pointed out that this is not the way to do it."
David Perell Clips92,519 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
"Weeping may be the closest experience human beings have to actual enlightenment. Because in weeping, you have given up. You've broken down. Whatever control you wanted over the world has slipped out of your hands. Whatever way you wanted to keep heartbreak at bay, whatever way you wanted to keep grief at bay, they've all been broken down by the grief, the loss, the person leaving you, by the diagnosis you've just been given in the hospital. You've actually dropped down below this perimeter, and it breaks apart through that overflow of emotions. The reason you're weeping is you haven't built a body that can hold that revelation. But now you're just about to do it. You're breaking open this controlled edge that you've had, and it's breaking out of there. You're becoming larger through the weeping. It's worth trying to have a practice of weeping, even if you can't go into full weeping, to feel the emotion as much as you can, because emotion is a doorway to something much deeper. Camus, the great French philosopher, said: 'live to the point of tears.'" — David Whyte
David Perell Clips45,830 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Children grow out of being artists. Elif Shafak explains why: "If you ask in a room full of children, 'Are there any artists in this room?' So many hands go up. All of them are artists. 'Are there writers in this room?' They're writers. 'Poets?' They're poets. At that age, girls are perhaps a little more vocal than boys. Then I'd give the same talk to 16 and 17-year-olds, and everything would have changed. 'Are there any writers in this room?' No hands go up. 'Are there any poets? Painters?' No hands. And girls have become timid. Because we taught them: be careful how you sit, how you talk, the length of your skirt, the sound of your voice...you will be judged. Once you are judged, you will be categorized. We internalize that fear, and little by little, that kills our creativity."
David Perell Clips47,439 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
What's wrong with writing with AI? Alain deBotton says: "I don't just write to produce a certain numbers of words. I write in order to honor certain feelings, and AI can't know those feelings because it's not me. It doesn't know what I want to say. And if I simply give my writing over to AI, it will crush my nascent sense about what it is I really want to say."
David Perell Clips94,233 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Our obsession with the news distorts our reality and "industrializes" our inner lives. Author and philosopher Alain de Botton explains: "People will routinely say things like, 'Of course, we're living in this very sad age.' And sometimes I think: says who? When did this age get anointed? Compared to what, the fourth century in Abyssinia, the twelfth century in Syria? Our inner lives have been industrialized. And commercialized. And that's no good for the free thinker, the honest thinker, the authentic thinker. "You're not really a responsible adult until you don't know certain things that people around you think are very important. If there's a singer you don't know about, a movie you just haven't crossed that threshold on--congratulate yourself. You're doing well. You're keeping a bit of your mental experience for yourself. We don't need to know everything that everybody else knows. We need to know the interesting bits of our own experience."
David Perell Clips36,301 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Creative workshops can be destructive because you get too much feedback. It's all over the place. The people giving you advice don't actually know you. Ocean Vuong says that in his workshops, people aren't allowed to critique other writers for the first few weeks. He says: "When you suspend critique, people are more willing to let the novelty of themselves come into the room. So we just put things in the center. When we look at a poem or short story, we simply talk about what we notice. And then once we know each other's tendencies, we can gear our feedback towards others." The importance of knowing someone before we give them feedback is obvious in other parts of life. For example, you would never walk up to a stranger on the street and instantly give them fashion advice. But that's exactly what we do in creative workshops.
David Perell Clips78,544 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten